42
LENIN COLLECTION

guarantee that Baku will not be attacked if we drive the English out of there. It is unknown how matters will develop there. We do not know where military aid is. We think it is held up near Tsaritsyn.

Regarding ambassadors and consuls, we advise you to adopt a waiting posture, placing them under triple surveillance and arresting suspicious persons in contact with them.

We are considering and preparing some assistance for you, but we cannot promise it with certainty, since everything depends on whether we succeed in driving the English out of Baku or whether they succeed in seizing part of the Caspian coast.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
Lenin

37440
TELEGRAM TO ALL GUBERNIAL, CITY AND DISTRICT SOVIETS AND FOOD COMMITTEES
August 30, 1918

The workers of Petrograd, Moscow, and the industrial regions are starving. The salvation of the revolution lies in the intensive work of local food organs. It is necessary to expand their activities by attracting new forces to the work, forces that already possess sufficient administrative experience, namely the members of the Executive Committees. The Executive Committees, in the persons of the most conscious elements of the working class, succeeded at the most difficult moment of the transition of power to the proletariat in sufficiently grasping and consolidating the administrative apparatus. They must transfer this experience to the organization of food supply matters.

For these purposes it is first of all necessary:

1) To strain all efforts and attract, insofar as possible, all members of the gubernial, city and district Executive Committees to work in the food supply field, leaving for current work in the sphere of administrative management only the absolutely necessary number of comrades.

2) Work should consist chiefly in the organization and collection of food and grain shipments and their dispatch to hungry regions. All organizational expenses will be paid from the People's Commissariat of Food Supply budget.

3) Immediately and in detail collect information on which gubernias, districts, and volosts are most in need of grain and other commodity shipments and in which there are surpluses that can be transported to needy regions. Information must be concentrated in the People's Commissariat of Food Supply, for which reason all gubernial and district Soviets must inform it on an urgent basis.

4) It is made the duty of all gubernial, city and district Soviets to immediately undertake the indicated work, executing precisely the directives of the People's Commissariat of Food Supply and working in complete unity with local food organs.

5) Notify the People's Commissariat of Food Supply of the time of receipt of this telegram and the commencement of work, and henceforth urgently inform it of successes or obstacles.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
Lenin

People's Commissariat of Food Supply
Tsyurupa

Printed from a typewritten copy.

27094
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF *PRAVDA*
September 18, 1918

Comrade Mikhail Nikolayevich Sanayev, Chairman of the Sergachsky District Party Committee (and member of the Executive Committee), presents most interesting material on the class struggle in the village and in the committees of the poor.

It is of extreme importance that precisely such factual material from the localities appear in the newspaper (otherwise there is far too much "general" reasoning). I most earnestly request that you record the comrade's statement and publish it.

With comradely greetings
Lenin